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End of the war

The Sri Lankan armed forces have won a comprehensive victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in a military campaign that began in the eastern province in August 2006. With its entire top leadership and thousands of fighting cadres killed in action, its military structure, assets, and capabilities destroyed, its political organisation decimated, the LTTE no longer exists as a military force. Belying conventional wisdom, Sri Lanka has found a military solution to w hat used to be regarded as an intractable armed secessionist and terrorist challenge. There is something poignant about the way in which the low-intensity conflict — which was waged over a quarter of a century and claimed tens of thousands of lives — has ended. The images of terrified children, women, and men fleeing the tiny sliver of coastal land in which they were confined by the Tigers for use as a human shield, and of a tractor load of bodies of senior LTTE leaders who made a final hopeless stand for a lost cause will continue to haunt the memories of journalists and others who witnessed these scenes. It might have been very different had an organisation that started out, in the 1970s, with some kind of emancipatory political vision and even idealism not turned Pol Potist in its extremism, cruelty, and horrific disregard for human life and welfare.

As the years went by and numerous proposals for a negotiated political solution fell by the wayside, the one thing that remained constant was the LTTE’s uncompromising secessionism and militarism, and the rising graph of its terrorist crimes, which included the assassination of a former Indian Prime Minister, a Sri Lankan President, a Foreign Minister, a presidential contender, and numerous democratic Tamil leaders, the massacre of Sinhala and Muslim civilians, ethnic cleansing, child conscription, and economic offences of various kinds. The ceasefire agreement of February 2002 represented a historic opportunity to break with the past. Tragically, the LTTE, seeing it mainly as an opportunity to re-arm itself and strengthen its parallel state structure in the territory it controlled, did everything conceivable to make the peace process falter and fail. “It was worse than a crime, a blunder,” is a Napoleonic era saying attributed to Talleyrand. If the May 1991 assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur by an LTTE squad dispatched by V. Prabakaran made a permanent enemy of India, the boycott enforced in the LTTE-controlled areas during the November 2005 presidential election, which facilitated Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory over ceasefire-architect Ranil Wickremasinghe in a close contest, was an akratic act that defied all rational explanation. President Rajapaksa has achieved what no previous Sri Lankan leader came close to doing: securing the integrity and sovereignty of Sri Lanka by freeing it from the malevolent challenge of the LTTE. Now, in the post-Prabakaran era, he needs to address two big tasks: rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of Tamils who have been through a prolonged nightmare, and crafting an enduring political solution based on far-going devolution of power to the Tamils in their areas of historical habitation. India, which has excellent relations with its southern neighbour, can make a constructive difference by coming up with a massive rehabilitation package for the North and encouraging Colombo to fast-track the political solution.

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